“Mitigation?” he says.
“Mira on my flank. She’s been training containment with me since the hub. If the twins’ amplification goes off mid-assault, she’s the only person besides me who can read it fast enough to redirect.” I lean against the windowsill. The stone is cold under my forearms. “Marcellus builds the same blast protocol he built for the hub. The team clears when the gift flares. Nobody approaches me during an event.”
“And between events?”
“Between events I’m the best combat asset you have, and you know it.” I meet his eyes. “The power at full amplification took down reinforced doors and pinned a man to a ceiling. In the estate corridors, against guards who are expecting vampire speed andnot expecting telekinetic force from a pregnant woman in a stolen shirt, I’m a variable Konstantin hasn’t accounted for.”
I keep my voice flat the whole way through, because if I let it shake on a single word he will hear the thing I am not saying, which is that I am about to carry our children into a building built to kill everyone inside it, and the math I just recited out loud is the only wall I have left between me and the part of my own head that has been screaming since he said the word estate.
His jaw works. He doesn’t argue. He can’t. The tactical case is sound and he knows it. The personal case is agony and he knows that too, and the distance between those two truths is where this marriage lives, in the space where the best commander and the best husband are making different calls and the man who is both has to choose which one to listen to.
“The separation,” he says. “You and Mira take the southern three. Seraphina and I take the north four. Julian coordinates from the ridge, outside the kill radius, which he fought and lost.” He says it level and precise, and his hands stay flat and still on the sill, the stillness he goes to when everything underneath is moving, and the bond brings me what the voice and the hands are both suppressing, the controlled fury of a man planning his wife’s route through a kill building.
“And if it goes off near you?” I say. “In the corridors, before we split?”
I’ve thought about this. It’s been sitting in the back of my tactical planning since the night the force reached for him in our bed and mapped the seams of how to take him apart. The proximity risk. The fact that the twins’ amplification reaches for what’s nearest, and in the corridors of the estate, in the first minutes before we split to our respective nodes, the nearest thing will be him.
“You catch it. You’ve caught it every time.” He looks at me. “Itrust you more than I trust the walls of any building. That hasn’t changed.”
I lean my forehead against his chest. The mark pulses warm under my shirt, and his answers, and the two of them beat crimson in the dark. His free hand comes to the back of my head and stays there, and for the length of one breath we are just two people standing at a window with a war days away, neither of us willing to make a different choice than the one that costs us both.
“Nine days,” I say into his chest.
“Nine days.” His mouth against my hair. “And then we build the house.”
“With the yard.”
“With the yard.”
I close my eyes. His heartbeat under my ear. The four-count I’ve learned to listen for, present, all of them accounted for.
The estate. The dead-man’s switch. The seven nodes. An hour inside a building that will kill us all if any piece of it breaks.
And the man holding me chose to let me stand beside him for every second of it, and the letting cost him more than the walking in ever will.
The window stays dark. The war waits for morning.
I take his hand and lead him across the hall instead of to bed. We stand in the doorway of the unfinished room. The half-built crib, the rails he planed himself and hasn’t trued, Julian’s chair, the folded blanket, and neither of us says anything for a while.
“I’ll finish the crib before we go,” he says.
“The rails are crooked.”
“I know.” His jaw sets. “I’ll true them.”
“You won’t.” I put my hand on the rail, on the small honest crookedness of a thing built by hands that were made for other work. “You’ll finish it, and you’ll leave the rails exactly like this, because our children are going to sleep in the only crooked thingtheir father ever built, and when they’re old enough to ask why, I’m going to tell them.”
He looks at the rail under my hand. The bond goes warm and unsteady at once.
“Crooked,” he says. “Understood.”
We’re ready.
Chapter
Eighteen
Carson’s hands are steady on the final calibration, and his wife has been dead for three years.
